The narrator’s discovery of a heretofore-unknown society of humans who have evolved very different physical abilities (due to their mastery of a power akin to electricity called “Vril”) shakes his faith in American progress. The finding inspires a fantasy in which the narrator becomes absolute ruler of the “Vril-ya” (his name for the subterranean peoples he discovered), and he attempts to bring the “blessings” of American institutions to the people of the underworld.28 Despite the narrator’s origins from what he felt was the most advanced civilization on Earth, he becomes convinced that the Vril-ya are superior in power and would eventually climb to the surface to “destroy and replace our existent varieties of man.”29 Though he escapes from the Vril-ya and returns to the surface, the book ends ominously, suggesting that it is only a matter of time before the Vril-ya ascend to the surface and conquer the world.
Perhaps tellingly, the narrator refers to the Vril-ya not as another species, but as another race. The narrator’s encounter with this powerful “race” of human beings suggested the apocalyptic possibilities of Darwin’s theory. Westerners, in spite of their conviction of their own superiority, could be displaced as indifferently as they had dislodged others in ascending the evolutionary ladder. Another possible development Bulwer-Lytton may have been hinting at was the future of Westerners as an unrecognizable species, if it continued down the path of modernization.
While Bulwer-Lytton demonstrated the anxieties attendant with Darwin’s theory of natural selection, other novelists and writers with similar anxieties did not resort to imagining a fictional race of beings conquering Western society. As immigration from China increased, some white Americans became persuaded that Western civilization was under siege from Asia. Americans blamed immigrants from Japan and China for outbreaks of plague in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and a discourse surrounding the eradication of Japanese beetles migrating into American agriculture during the 1920s helped further dehumanize the Japanese.30 Americans were not alone in their racist alarm; Europeans, from their experience colonizing China and India and contending with Japan’s growing imperialist ambitions by the late nineteenth century, also believed that Asia endangered Western civilization.31
The so-called yellow peril of the Chinese (and, later, the Japanese) had apocalyptic dimensions, and its proponents used explicit evolutionary language to describe it. The American author Jack London wrote in a 1904 essay that Anglo-Saxons had essential characteristics that other races could never hope to attain: “soul stuff … is the product of an evolution, which goes back to the raw beginnings of the race. Our soul stuff is not a coin to be pocketed by the first chance comer. The Japanese cannot pocket it any more than he can thrill to short Saxon words or we can thrill to Chinese hieroglyphics.”32 Even if Anglo-Saxons had special “soul stuff,” the Chinese and Japanese could still find another evolutionary advantage and conquer the world through their overwhelming numbers.
Pierton W. Dooner, an Arizona newspaper editor, wrote The Last Days of the Republic in 1880, two years before Congress passed a ban on Chinese immigration, in order to demonstrate how Asia threatened to overwhelm United States. Dooner is up-front about his belief in Anglo-Saxon supremacy. The eventual war that breaks out between the Chinese and the Americans has to be apocalyptic because, in Dooner’s conception, the Americans were “a people unlike the Asiatics in everything; a people who, having never felt the arm of despotism, would submit to nothing in the way of oppression or political injustice for any considerable length of time.”33 The Americans, on the other hand, learn quickly that though they had considered the Chinese as beneath them, the Chinese are excellent soldiers, “executing all the evolutions of a difficult military drill and the manual of arms with an ease and regularity unsurpassed by even a body of veteran soldiers.”34 Dooner expresses his dismay at the situation of American politics in 1880, suggesting that by allowing Chinese immigration and valuing commercial interests above all else, the American government allowed a “fifth column” inside its borders, unwittingly aiding the destruction of the United States.35 In the end, the Chinese replace Anglo-Saxons as the dominant power on Earth. The U.S. defeat occurs in a maudlin passage: “as she sank, engulfed, she carried with her the prestige of a race; for in America the representatives of the one race of man, which in its relation to the family of men, had borne upon its crest the emblem of sovereign power since the dawn of history, saw now the ancestral diadem plucked from its proud repose, to shed its luster upon an alien crown.”36
Americans tended to view the “yellow peril” with apocalyptic-level anxiety—it meant no less than the end of modern civilization. However, in regard to technological growth, Americans on the whole remained optimistic prior to World War II in comparison to the British and Europeans. One notable exception was the American satirist and novelist Mark Twain, who expressed his doubts about modern industrial life in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889).
Hank Morgan, the “Connecticut Yankee,” is the champion of modern industrial America. He sees himself cut from the same cloth as those he terms the “creators of this world—after God—Gutenberg, Watt, Arkwright, Whitney, Morse, Stephenson, Bell.”37 His first-person tale of the events that transpire upon his mysterious transportation from Connecticut to sixth-century England reveals his unquestioning acceptance of nineteenth-century American capitalism and technology. Morgan, who had worked in a munitions factory where he “learned to make everything: guns, revolvers, cannon, boilers, engines, all sorts of labor-saving machinery,”38 introduces that same technology to medieval England, seeing his magical teleportation as an opportunity to form the ultimate modern society under his leadership.
Morgan is proud of the new society he creates in old England: “Slavery was dead and gone; all men were equal before the law; taxation had been equalized. The telegraph, the telephone, the phonograph, the typewriter, the sewing machine and all the thousand willing and handy servants of steam and electricity were working their way into favor.”39 But despite Morgan’s attempts to undermine the social structure of medieval England, attacking the clergy (for its superstition) as well as the aristocracy and the monarchy (for their undeserved privilege), the people he saw as no more than savages resist him. At the end of the novel, he barricades himself in his old headquarters at Camelot with a loyal follower and powerful guns so he can destroy “civilization.”40 And in fact, Morgan does not merely destroy his factories and defend himself against the angry knights; he extinguishes them. His description of the battle is apocalyptic in its dimensions: “The thirteen gatlings began to vomit death into the fated ten thousand.… Within ten short minutes after we had opened fire, armed resistance was totally annihilated.… Twenty-five thousand men lay dead around us.”41
Though Twain appeared to subscribe to Darwinism, unlike many of his contemporaries in the United States, he had little faith that evolution necessarily meant human progress. Hank Morgan laments at one point that “all that is original in us, and therefore fairly creditable or discreditable to us, can be covered up and hidden by the point of a cambric needle, all the rest being atoms contributed by, and inherited from, a procession of ancestors that stretches back a billion years to the Adam-clam or grasshopper or monkey from whom our race has been so tediously and ostentatiously and unprofitably developed.”42 According to Twain’s novel, capitalism and technology do not make better humans, and, indeed, they could prove to be the undoing of civilization. Connecticut Yankee was an early American example of the types of fears—human unimportance in the face of long evolutionary history and the potential for technological disasters—that would come to characterize much scientific apocalypticism after World War II.
Some American writers, such as the American Populist Ignatius Donnelly, thought the apparent end of the world could bring about a utopia, an idea that mirrored the premillennialist belief in a final judgment and destruction of the world followed by a millennium of peace.43 Donnelly was among a minority of Americans who did not see unending progress in America’s future. Immigration, urbanization, and the rise of corporations and factories seemed to be undermining the American way of life during the last decades